1/100 Master Grade Wing Gundam

Mobile Suit: XXXG-01W Wing Gundam
Release Date: April 2010
Series: Mobile Suit Gundam Wing

Start Date: May 25, 2012
Finish Date: June 19, 2012

This is perhaps the Gundam for English-speaking countries, and certainly one of my favorites aesthetically (even if the series was, in hindsight, not that great). The first gunpla kit I owned was the 1/144 NG Wing Gundam, so working on this kit was very nostalgic and I am mostly satisfied with the final product.

With this kit, I assembled the inner frame unpainted, and painted the exterior parts on-sprue with Testors and Tamiya spray cans. I cut them off the sprue when dry and touched up the nubs with hand paint where necessary. I panel-lined the kit using an extra-small (.10mm) black Faber-Castel PITT Artist Pen, and cleaned with 70% isopropyl alcohol. I went over the entire kit with Testors dullcoat.

The quality of my paint job is not perfect by any means; the white and red paints that I used were both flat, and went on with a grainy texture. The yellow paint that I had was about a year and a half old, and went on a bit globby. These were things that I thought would be minor when I noticed them, but ended up impacting the final product noticeably.

In addition, because of the flat paints, I was unable to use a panel wash and inked the kit in black; this was a bit too dark in my opinion and the clean-up was very difficult and smudged on some parts.

Nevertheless, it looks pretty good on the shelf and the kit itself is phenomenally engineered; it's everything that I expected when purchasing. It lives up to the anime vision, and modernizes the design to look more agile and athletic than the original Wing artwork. It was also a great learning experience, and now I have more of a handle on what to do and what not to do.

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